Original Dungeons & Dragons is The One True Game! You will hear about my campaign that started back in April 1971 as a Chainmail Fantasy Campaign and then moved to an OD&D Campaign in February 1974.

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Sunday, July 10, 2016

The Tarrozian Campaign World

I have four OD&D campaigns that share the same planet.
The main campaign is called the Tarrozian Campaign and it is the most deadly of
the four. The other three are more starter campaigns than anything else; they
are where children and new players start.

I started the world from the bottom up and that is all I did
for several years. Then I decided to do a little bit of top down just to define
where we were. So what we have is a planet with an earthlike climate and
gravity, but the surface area of Jupiter. (just keep thinking, "magic
makes it work this way.” I played around with a few very rough sketches of the
planetary surface and defined that the four campaigns are a long ways off from
each other, a very long way. Even though we are now in the 45th (real world)
year of the campaign and over 3800 game sessions in the campaign only a
fraction of the world has been mapped or explored. We like it that way, knowing
that there is really a vast unknown out there.

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Here is a little bit about one of the things IMC where there
was a diversion from the main campaign.

The players decided that they wanted me to start them out in
a completely new area of the world, so they had no map, info, or anything and
had to find out everything about where they were. At the time they had mostly
4th & 5th level characters with a 6th level magic-users IIRC. They told me
this as we were starting a regular gaming session, so I told them I would think
about it and have something completely new for them soon. And we started our
game. They headed out and traveled to the dungeon that they were making their
forays into and as they entered the first new room that they hadn't been in yet
the door slammed shut behind them the room went pitch black and spun around
holding them tight to the walls as it spun faster and faster and then the bottom
dropped away from their feet (yeah, just like the carnival ride), then as it
slowed down they started to fall and landed in the middle of a field in bright
sunlight at sunrise. (I.e. they were a long ways to the west of where they
were)

Well they spent a few days of game time getting acclimated
to the area, which was complicated by a bit of a language barrier, which they
had to overcome. They also were taken a ride on converting their money to local
currency. They gradually learned about a massive ruin that was about a 2-day
journey away to the southwest that no one ever returned from. They decided to
go look anyway.

When they arrived, they found a ruin that was about a mile
on a side, it was an enormous pile of rubble and as they searched, they found
the remains of four city gates, one at the center of each side and a path that
led into the ruins. Each path was similar and it was narrow with rubble piled
high on each side. They picked one to try and as they crossed into the ruin
onto the path, instead of seeing a path that looked like it had had some recent
use, it changed to a path with deep piled dust that looked untouched for
centuries. The rubble was covered with dust. This was quite odd since outside
the ruins there had been recent rain, since they arrived, but the ruins, which
looked weathered from the outside, looked untouched by the weather from the
inside. They found through trying that they could not leave the path, well they
could but it was like moving through cold molasses there was so much resistance
to moving. They went in a little way and decided that they would go back
outside camp and start in in the morning.

That is when they discovered that they could not leave
because as they moved back toward the outside they begin to age. They first
realized this when they started getting weaker and they noticed that each
other’s hair was going grey at a rapid pace. They moved back toward the center
and this reversed itself. They then saw that they had no choice at this point
and set out toward the center.

(for anyone crying railroad, it is just giving them what
they asked for, something completely new.)

As they continued towards the center the dust became
progressively thinner until eventually it disappeared altogether. They tried
turning back several times each time with the same results. They also continued
to try to leave the path, especially after they barely survived several traps
along the way, but could not do so. They also noticed when they looked at the
sky that the sun flickered and seemed to move rapidly back and forth (not in
the east-west direction but in the north-south direction. As they traveled
further down the path it finally seemed that the sun was one solid sun several
suns in width. They were unable to tell the passage of time as the sun (aside
from its weird side-to-side movement) seemed to stay in the same place in the
sky and not move. Nevertheless, as the traveled down the path they had to stop
and eat many times, even though they did not grow sleepy or excessively tired.
Even rationing the water, they were growing concerned about running out.

As they drew nearer to the center and rounded the last
corner they could see a ruined tower in the center as they moved toward it, it
started to become less ruined in appearance. In addition, the ruins around them
started to look fresher and fresher as they went.

As they drew nearer to the center, they started to be able
to smell smoke and hear the screams of women, the crying children, the shouts
of men, and the shouts of the invaders. They began to see shadows of people all
around them and things grew more visible as they continued.

They stopped several times studying everything they could
see, and trying to plan for whatever was going to happen. They were a few feet
from the where the path entered a large courtyard around the tower and they
could see that it appeared to end at the courtyard.

They finally got to just outside the courtyard and stopping
for a moment they made final arrangements and then stepped thorough into the
courtyard and immediately stumbled over a huge pile of dead bodies, not of the
defenders of the city or the invaders but men dressed as they were from their
time, and before, hundreds of bodies (they realized) of all the adventurers
that had proceeded them. All around the pile of the dead was another circle of
the dead invaders that had fought these other-time arrivals. Several score of
invaders guarded the base of the tower, a score of these invaders were
struggling towards them over all the bodies, and they immediately retreated
toward a wall and then back down the street that had replaced the path they had
just traversed. The noise was deafening, with screams and shouts. Over it all,
they heard a loud chant in an unknown tongue that the magic-users in the group
recognized as a spell being cast. It seemed to come from the tower.

They hotfooted it around a corner and down an alley. It was
chaos all around them. They made it several streets further from the center and
then they saw a women furtively slipping along and just as she was entering a
building a few invaders appeared (the invaders are at this point an unknown
humanoid that seemed to be a strange mixture of reptile, insect and mammal)and
quickly entered the same building.

They decided to follow them into the building and moving
rapidly they entered the building and with all the noise where able to slip up
behind the invaders and kill them. In the process of doing this, they freed the
women whom the invaders had just captured. While a couple of the group secured
and watched the doors, the two with the greatest charisma bowed deeply to the
women and tried conversing with her. However, they were unable to find any
language in common. Therefore, they resorted to sign language to try to ask her
some questions, but after looking very doubtful and ill at ease, she then
seemed to come to a decision and relax after no one tried to touch her.

She then signed for them to follow her and led them to a
lower level and a secret door. They all followed her in and lighting a torch
found several women and children. The women, a redhead, pointed to herself and
they traded names, after this Taibiatonia (or Red for short) led them through
passages sometimes down and sometimes up, a long twisting route. They often
heard shouts and the clash of arms in the distance. Once they came face to face
with a few invaders and rushed to close with them. They killed the invaders but
not before sustaining several wounds among them. These were bound in a hurry
and they continued along.

Red led them along and then she signed for quiet and for
people to wait and slipped ahead, the stealthiest member of the group went with
her and when they came back he told the rest of the group that they way out was
blocked by a group of invaders and it looked like there were too many to fight
our way thorough, but Red signed for everyone to follow her and after back
tracking a little she led them out a different way. After passing through a
choke point, the way started up at a steady angle. They walked like this for
some time until the floor leveled out and led to a wall.

Red went to this wall and tripped a mechanism and it opened
out of the side of a hill into a wooded glen. They closed it back and hid it
again as best they could. She led them another mile to a hidden shelter and
there they stopped. After eating and setting up watches they were looking back
toward the city where it glowed way in the distance (and at a much lower
elevation) from the fires and then all of a sudden there was a kind of pulse
and then the city went completely dark. A few minutes later a terribly loud
shattering sound was heard.

The senior magic-user stated that the spell that was being
cast must have been completed and it probably explained all that had happened
to the group since they had entered the ruins.

We played out about 50 game years (these characters and
their children) in this new campaign area at the rate of about every other
gaming session. They eventually learned the language and the lay of the land,
about the invaders, married, had children and accepted that they were not going
home. By the time, they reached the 11th-12th level they were able to inflict
some major defeats on the invaders and drive them from the land by continuous
guerrilla warfare, a lot of luck and by stealing some of the invaders magic.
Eventually they were able to neutralize the spell on the ruins so that no one
else would be trapped in the past and they were able to release hundreds of
women and children that were trapped in their hidey-holes in stasis. The
original characters were able to retire and then played on in this part of the
world as some of the children and other characters. These later characters were
quite bold and a number of TPKs occurred as they adventured far and wide.

They were eventually able to estimate (i.e. get enough hints
out of me) that they had went back in time about 2500 years.